New Marriage Adjustments

 While dating and courtship can be stressful a new marriage can be just as much so; if not more. There can be a bit of learning curve in the beginning due to cohabitation, difference in culture and other reasons that I may not be aware of.

In my family specifically difference of culture was easy to see. My dad is a white male born in the United States and my mother is a Filipina native. It was easy to see in most cases growing up that my Mom and Dad had a hard time understanding each other's way of thinking. However, not for lack of trying. My father and mother through a lot of painstaking effort turned our home into, in my opinion, the perfect blend of Philippine and American culture. It wasn't a fast change either it took time and effort. It fist started with the food my parents are both really good cooks and they would split the cooking responsibilities. Not only did this help them increase their partnership it also allowed them to share each of their cultures food with each other, my siblings and I. One compromise helped mediate two challenges that could have caused negative outcomes in the long term. It is communication like this that helps us to adjust to newly married life. While not married myself I am glad I have learned this as a preparation for the future. 

Communication is the key to adjustment in a marriage. If a newly wed couple doesn't communicate for even the small things it can lead to heavy consequences. In the 7th Edition of the book, "The Newly Married: A Family without Children", they talk about one of the most important factors to communicate about in a new marriage saying, "One of the more important tasks is establishing a pattern of resolving conflicts." Resolving conflict is important in any relationship and establishing a way to resolve conflict early on is really important. The same book states later on saying, "the pattern you establish in the first year of marriage is likely to be the pattern you maintain throughout your marriage." This means that it is really important to hash out as many would be communication issues as quickly as possible. One example of conflict resolution that I have seen and really enjoyed was in a show called "How I Met Your Mother", in it there is a couple their names are Marshall and Lily and one thing that they do if they feel a conflict is getting to heated they will say, "Pause!" to put the argument on hold until they both cool down a little bit. I enjoyed the concept though it's success rate wasn't perfect it was a habit they established early on and they always made sure to come back to the argument and resolve it. The "Pause" effect came with two commitments, one to put an argument on hold if it was getting too heated and 2 to always make sure they resolved the argument. Honestly, this is one of my favorite methods for conflict resolution. It helps to give the couple a moment to cool down and still make sure the conflict gets resolved. It's two bird and one stone as it were. 

Now I'm not saying that this is the only way to resolve conflict. Finding a way to resolve conflict is a very personal matter between the couple but it doesn't mean you can't learn from the examples of other couples or even on screen couples. Figuring things out definitely takes trial and error. What really matters is how important is it to you to establish good habits early on in your marriage? What are you willing to do so you can get there? My best advice. Talk to your spouse and hash things out. Communication will always be the first step to a solution involving more than one person, especially in marriage.